The semi-mysterious start-up known as Faraday Future made a rare appearance at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and with it came an all-electric, 1000-horsepower supercar called the FFZERO1.
As you can see from the renderings and CGI footage in the video above, the FFZERO1 is clearly a concept. (The lack of side-view mirrors is always a dead giveaway.) But the accompanying press release hints at some interesting possibilities:
At an event prior to the opening of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Faraday Future (FF) introduced its plan to rethink mobility, unveiling its FFZERO1 Concept and the proprietary engineering platform on which it’s built, in addition to revealing the details of its strategic cooperation with Letv, a leading global technology brand.
The company’s first ever concept, the FFZERO1 is a high performance electric vehicle built upon FF’s Variable Platform Architecture (VPA), a modular engineering system optimized for electric vehicles, on which all future FF production vehicles will be based.
The VPA will enable FF to minimize production costs, deliver exceptional quality and safety, dramatically increase its speed to market, and could easily support a range of vehicle types and sizes. FF applied the high performance FFZERO1 Concept to the VPA in order to maximize the platform’s potential and showcase its flexibility.
FF also announced a strategic cooperation with Letv that will enable it to benefit from Letv’s expertise in content and technology. The two companies will build advanced electric vehicles by bringing together resources from the following four domains: technology, automotive, internet and cloud, and entertainment content.
So, basically, the FFZERO1 is modular, like Google’s long-awaited Ara mobile phone, and it’s connected to the web, and it’s like Facebook on wheels. Also, it’s a single-seater.
Sounds like every high school kid’s wet dream.
Will Faraday Future prove a worthy rival to Tesla? Who knows, but the company’s founder, Jia Yueting, has made a killing in China with his technology company mentioned above, Letv (often described as “China’s answer to Netflix”). And in the coming weeks, Faraday plans to break ground on a $1 billion facility outside Las Vegas. In other words, the money’s there, which is a nice start.
We’ll know more when Faraday Future’s first production model rolls off the assembly line in about two years.